Aspects of this invention relate to selecting and performing a software action automatically in response to the detection of a new electronic media or a device connected to a computer. In recent years, the numbers of electronic formats for media files and documents has grown significantly. As computers have become larger and more powerful tools, they have also attempted to become compatible with these various electronic media and document formats. Computers today will typically support many different methods of creating and storing an electronic document. For example, in a typical personal computer, a user who creates a new image file can store that image as a JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, BMP, or any of several other image formats. This abundance of electronic formats also applies for video files, audio files, and other document types such as word processing documents.
As the number of electronic file formats has grown, so has the number of software programs installed on the typical personal computer able to view and interact with those files. A single computer might have several different software programs each capable of interpreting and/or otherwise interacting with various file formats. For example, a user many have many image viewer and editor programs capable of interpreting and displaying a JPEG image.
A feature named AutoPlay was included as part of the operating system Windows XP made by Microsoft Corporation. This feature detects content, such as pictures, music, or video file types, on removable media (such as a CD-ROM) and removable devices. The AutoPlay feature then automatically launches an application to play or display that content. Despite its benefits, improvements to this feature were possible.